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Monday, July 14, 2008

Mario Kart Wii (Finally)

I've been trying to buy it for a month.

I'm at work, and I reach one of the inevitable lulls, so I pop open a few tabs in the background. I keep a bunch of links to sites that I visit often in my Bookmarks Toolbar folder, which have no titles, just icons.

Ben's Bargains: Nothing interesting. Another $10 TrendNet router. I bought one of these for $7 after rebate. Periodically, it stops working for no reason until you cycle the power.

Slickdeals.net: Hmm... the Xbox 360 is getting cheaper: $300 with a $25 gift card (to buy half a game, presumably). Not interested, though. Oh, what's this? A Best Buy coupon for $10 off a $75 video game purchase? Hmm...

I had been checking Bestbuy.com relatively regularly ever since I had received the $50 gift card as a consolation prize for buying an HD DVD player.

When Mario Kart Wii came out, I hadn't received it yet (or at least I hadn't yet opened it--it was sitting in a pile of my pre-move mail), and the game had been out of stock everywhere every time I had checked since then. It was a long shot, but last week I had stopped by GameStop and asked them when they expected a shipment, and they had said "next week". Since this was E3 week, that made sense, so that factored into the probability equation.

Best Buy doesn't let you search with a keyword link, or at least I haven't found a way to do so, so I fired up the home page, entered "mario kart wii" into the search box, and clicked on the correct result: "Sold out online".

That was expected. I hit the in-store availability link, entered my zip code, and presto:

The one store within 50 miles (or whatever) with the game was my store. There was only one thing to do, really. I hopped over to the Reward Zone website and printed out a copy of my $5 certificate (which was about to expire in under two weeks), printed out the coupon noted on Slickdeals, and then headed over to the store, conveniently located within 10 minutes of work.

The coupon requires a $75 purchase, so I decided to also get two off-brand nunchuck controllers priced at $15 a piece. I had only bought 1 extra nunchuck since my original Wii stuff had been stolen.

Total damage: $20.82

Total haul: Mario Kart Wii (with Wii Wheel), 2 Wii Edge controllers

They have plenty more in stock, as well as a stack of Wii consoles (they were there at noon at least--first time I've seen them in the wild), if anyone local is interested.